Aliyah saves life of Russian LGBTQ woman against Ukraine war

Maria-Valeria Morris took English classes since she was three years old in her hometown of Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. 

“My teachers gave me the best gift: They taught me not to be afraid to make a mistake, not to think of English as a foreign language, just as a medium of life,” she says. 

“My teachers gave me the best gift: They taught me not to be afraid to make a mistake, not to think of English as a foreign language, just as a medium of life.”

Maria-Valeria Morris

Her fluent English has stood her in good stead, and so has her willingness to take some risks.

Brought up by her Jewish mother and maternal grandparents, Morris had not visited Israel, but she did think about making aliyah.

“And that helped me a lot because when things started looking terrifying early last year, I already had a visa. Moving to Israel in May of 2022 was a matter of life and death.”

“And that helped me a lot because when things started looking terrifying early last year, I already had a visa. Moving to Israel in May of 2022 was a matter of life and death.”

Maria-Valeria Morris

She had been living in Moscow since the age of 14.

“Obviously, I was against the war,” she says, “and I had immediate family in Ukraine – my uncle and his family. They are safe now in Bulgaria.”

Morris has graduate degrees in law and cultural anthropology. Never interested in being a lawyer, she taught art history, anthropology and cultural history at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. She edited an academic journal, Urban Folklore and Anthropology, which explores how folklore helps convey political protest.

From 2017 to mid-2022, she taught at the Liberal Arts College of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration. 

Reasons to make aliyah: Being against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and being LGBTQ+ in Russia

“When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, my students and I were crying,” she says. “In March, our department had a visit from the General Prosecution Office. They accused us of distorting history and promoting Western values. Things got rather draconian.”

“When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, my students and I were crying. In March, our department had a visit from the General Prosecution Office. They accused us of distorting history and promoting Western values. Things got rather draconian.”

Maria-Valeria Morris

There was another reason that the situation was dangerous for Morris.

“I’m a queer person [gay], and for me it’s basically illegal to exist in Russia,” she explains. “I didn’t want to wait until the General Prosecution Office paid a personal visit to me, so I thank God for the visa in my passport.”

When she and her mother arrived at the Moscow airport with one-way tickets to Israel, she recalls, “I saw four or five men from the security forces, in civilian clothes, standing next to a little door and watching people going to passport control. I knew exactly who they were and why they were standing there, as it was widely discussed on Telegram chats of soon-to-be olim. People reported that they were ordering passengers to show them their chat history, picking passengers out of the queue and interrogating them until the plane was gone. It was really, really scary.”

To her relief, the men did not single out her and her mother for interrogation.

THEY LANDED safely in Israel and initially stayed with her aunt’s friends in Tel Aviv. 

“As soon as I landed at Ben-Gurion, I felt the freedom in the air,” Morris says.

That feeling motivated her to come out publicly, which led to a parting of ways with her mother.

Morris now shares an apartment in Haifa with her best friend from Moscow, who made aliyah with her husband in the summer. The cooler northern weather suits her, and she loves the city’s diversity and multiculturalism. 

“At least I can now be open about who I am, and that’s a really drastic change,” says Morris. “I went to Pride Week in Tel Aviv and could never have imagined such a feeling of acceptance and diversity, like a whole other planet.” 

In July, she began working at RGB Media in Tel Aviv as a client relations manager. She found out about the job opening through a comment on Facebook.

“I never thought my background in anthropology could have a practical application, but both anthropology and client relations are about talking to people and structuring the information you get from them,” she observes.

Morris has found the atmosphere at RGB “really, really supportive.” To help her work with clients who aren’t English speakers, the company paid for her to attend beginners’ ulpan. She wants to continue learning the local language “because it saddens me that I cannot read books in Hebrew.”

She also signed up for academic drawing and painting classes in Haifa. “I’m voluntarily rising at 6 a.m. every Wednesday to go to the studio,” she says. 

While teaching at the university, Morris drew cartoons to accompany a screenplay her partner wrote. This work was shortlisted in 2021 for an exhibition. She even created a course on the history and theory of comics and animation.

“Now,” she says, “I want to acquire graphic skills because I want to do the illustrations for a graphic novel about my aliyah and love in a time of war.”

Her fiancé, a non-Jewish trans man from Russia, is currently a master’s student in Ireland.

“We would like to get married, but we can only do that in a few countries because formally we are both female at this time,” Morris explains. 

“We’d like him to be able to come to Israel and build a life here together, but the procedure is very bureaucratized. We have to get married and get some papers from Russia, then ask for permission from the Interior Ministry for him to come here and start a five-year process of naturalization. We very much hope to get married next winter in Denmark. I guess until then I will go to Ireland very often.”

Ireland fascinates her. Her PhD thesis was on 18th-century law in Ireland and Scotland. Until the Russia-Ukraine war changed her plans, she intended to apply for a PhD program in Ireland. But she never wanted to move there.

“It’s true that I was always interested in Ireland, but you want to live at home. Since I identify as Jewish, that home was Israel,” she explains. “I had a sense of ‘if not now, when?’”

Her favorite aspect of Israel is that “everyone is very kind and ready to help. I really feel welcomed.”

Living in Israel, she says, has taught her that “you have all the time in the world to become whoever you want to be, with all the complexity, frailty and uniqueness of being a living, breathing human being.”■

MARIA-VALERIA MORRIS, 35 FROM RUSSIA TO HAIFA, 2022